Electronic Dream

Producer behind the recent reemergence of Dipset and Cam'ron strikes out on his own, making lush instrumentals with his own fully developed aesthetic.

Alongside the roaring Harlem rapper Vado, Rhode Island native AraabMuzik has been one of the key figures in the re-emergence of Cam'ron, Dipset's language-bending figurehead. After a long period of complete disappearance, Cam's been going through something of a comeback lately, aided in large part by tracks like Araab's punishing "Get It in Ohio". Araab's work for Cam, and for other freelance clients, sounds dollar-store cheap but knife-edge tense; it reminds me of Steve Jablonsky's score for Friday the 13th. He makes ferocious, diamond-hard gangsta rap beats with a pervading sense of dystopic anxiety. Araab's sense of vision comes through even more strongly in the web videos he's been releasing, in which he shows off his MPC virtuosity and slices up samples of, oh, say, Cannibal Corpse. Like fellow underground rap visionaries Clams Casino and DJ Burn One, Araab makes freelance beats that hint at a fully developed personal aesthetic. And like those guys, he's now striking out on his own, making instrumental music that brings that aesthetic to the forefront.

Electronic Dream is Araab's first commercially available album, but it works more like a collection of remixes. Rather than creating his own tracks from scratch, Araab spends his debut album dismembering a series of cheesed-out hairgel-house superclub anthems: DJ Nosferatu's "The Underground Stream" on "Underground Stream", Jam & Spoon's "Right in the Night (Fall in Love With Music)" on "Golden Touch", Starchaser's "So High" on "Feelin So Hood". This is, to put it mildly, an unexpected direction for Araab. With a little bit of Googling, you can find plenty of online screeds from fans frustrated or even enraged at Araab for making an album based on this music, or for dishonoring his sample sources by leaving large pieces of these tracks unchanged while neglecting to properly credit the original producers. But Araab's changes, relatively minor though they may be, turn a sound built on populist uplift into something darker.

It's tough to imagine the tracks on Electronic Dream getting any play in any dance club in the world, and it's virtually impossible to picture anyone rapping over them. Instead, this album is a genre unto itself-- ominous future shit that creates an atmosphere but never bleeds into the background. Araab's snare-hits resonate like eye-punches, and his drum-programming is pure, unrelenting rap shit. But he's applying that sensibility to songs where the melodies shine even when Araab's using a screaming sound effect as part of the rhythm track. The end result is a truly weird little album-- something at once anxious and euphoric.

As hard as his drums punch, though, Araab still let the textures of these anthems shine through. And in Araab's hands, these melodies work differently; the anonymous dance divas wailing ecstatically over their original beats become lost, lonely souls, anxiously whispering to themselves that everything will be OK. Araab's music doesn't allow for dizzy buildups and cathartic breakdowns; instead, it's all murky tension, all the time. At times, his tracks can sound a bit like the woozy bass music of L.A.'s Brainfeeder scene, but Araab is always more direct and more ferocious than those guys. And yet the sugary beauty of those melodies sound like they belong on his tracks; nothing is out of place. "Got a feelin' so high," the singer on "Feelin So Hood" coos, and the drums beat that feeling down while the gorgeous ripples of synth lift it back up.

There's something truly fascinating about the entire LP: An up-and-coming hardcore rap producer leaving his genre behind so that he can twist and scramble this hands-in-the-air big-room sound. And in peeling back its excesses and substituting in his own eccentricities, Araab uncovers a primal emotional force in this music, one that fits beautifully with his own air-raid siren aesthetic. Electronic Dream is pretty, but it's pretty like the morning sun twinkling off of a dangling machete blade-- you don't want to fuck with it.